Third Installment. NYTimes | Kristof | Going Home with Hope This is the third installment on Kristof's series on freeing and taking home 2 Cambodian girls who were trafficked for prostitution. Although he admits in it that it is not always so… [Flailing in the Surf]

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hmmmm, hmmmmmmmmm, not sure that buying them out is the proper thing to do though inarguably it is effective. well in any case, this is a worthwhile read and somethign to consider.

ITU Workshop on Internet Governance. The Action Plan approved last month at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) included a request that the UN Secretary General “set up a working group on Internet governance, in an open and inclusive process…to investigate and make… [InternetPolicy.net]

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”. What a great line. (This piece by Bill French might be the original source.) Via Lilia, who reflects on asking questions in public.
[Seb's Open Research]

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or in some cases…. archived…

If at First You Don't Succeed, Stop!.

Just read Open Access News' blog of Information Today's If at First You Don't Succeed, Stop!: Proposed Legislation to Set Up New Intellectual Property Right in Facts Themselves. I'm getting ready to leave town within the hour, so I don't have time to either read or discuss this at length right now, but if you read the “NetCoalition's Top 10 Examples of the Potential Impact of H.R. 3261,” it would seem that teachers and researchers may need to fear this bill as much as the DMCA. For instance,

4. A university professor might be precluded from gathering weather information from a variety of Web sites for use in a paper that argues for or against the increase of global warming.

5. A local PTA might be prohibited from assembling information on drugs and other treatments for childhood diseases to make their research available on the organization's Web site.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

Social Origin of Good Ideas. I read Ronald S. Burt's “Social Origin of Good Ideas” and it inspires me to think about trends in interdisciplinary thought. [Orange Cone]

Avoiding a Shocking Experience for the Information Consumer. Avoiding a Shocking Experience for the Information Consumer
http://www.oclc.org/membership/escan/introduction/default.htm

The 2003 OCLC Environmental Scan suggests that, paradoxically, a worthy goal of the library might be “invisibility” — in the sense that the service is ubiquitous and fully integrated into the infosphere. “After all, technology and services are most welcome in our lives when we do not have to devote much thought to them. We press a switch and light comes or goes. Expecting the information consumer to pay attention to the differences between William Shakespeare the author and William Shakespeare the subject as search terms is akin to expecting Joe Householder to know if the red wire or the black wire should be grounded before he plugs the lamp in — and expect Joe to go to RedWire.com to figure out what happens if he's wrong. Thankfully, clever people have hidden all this technology inside a box and millions are saved from a shocking experience.” [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]

alex invited me to orkut, so i invited some more people, and hopefully they will invite more people, and we'll see how many people end up joining. also i created the usual communities, internet researchers, science and technology studies, etc.